As the world moves online, new ways of doing business are enabled that allow companies to operate at a massive scale with a diverse and global customer base. What were traditionally offline applications are moving online; applying for a mortgage with your local bank manager, purchasing a car from your nearest dealership, meeting with an insurance broker for business insurance, renting a property with an estate agent. These high-trust use cases used to rely on in-person interactions to assess trust.
When they move online, an often surprising and unexpected reality of this shift is the magnitude of fraud that exists. Managing fraud is a make or break game—if left unchecked, it destroys profit margins. Moving online opens up the floodgates of fraudsters who see these applications as easy targets, particularly when companies strive for automated decisioning, making them even more impersonal and vulnerable. It becomes incredibly difficult to determine whether an applicant and their information can be trusted.
In these online application processes, applicants are asked to submit information about themselves: where they live, how much they earn, proof of company ownership, bank balance, and more. These data points are most often proven using documents or API connections. From processing 100,000s of applications, we have observed that up to 3-5% of high-value online applications contain fraudulent information. Read rest here.